Technology as Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism

Theory, Culture & Society

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2014, Pages 119-140

  Hornborg, Alf ^a  

^a LUND UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

capitalism; Cartesian objectivism; fetishism; Latour; Marx; technology

Indexed keywords

EID: 84905104902     PISSN: 02632764     EISSN: 14603616     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488960     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Adas M. (1989) Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2. Adas M. (2006) Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
3. Apter, E. and Pietz, W. (eds) (1993) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
4. Bateson G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Frogmore: Paladin.
5. Baudrillard J. (1972) Pour une critique de l'economie politique du signe. Paris: Gallimard.
6. Baudrillard J. (1975) The Mirror of Production. St Louis: Telos.
7. Benton T. (1989) Marxism and natural limits: An ecological critique and reconstruction. New Left Review 178: 51–86.
8. Binfield, K. (ed.) (2004) Writings of the Luddites. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
9. Bird-David N. (1999) “Animism” revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology 40(1): S67–S91.
10. Blaut J.M. (1993) The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: The Guilford Press.
11. Blaut J.M. (2000) Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: The Guilford Press.
12. Bloch, M. (1989) ‘The symbolism of money in Imerina’. In: Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (eds). Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 165–190.
13. Bloor D. (1999) Anti-Latour. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30(1): 81–112.
14. Descola P. (1994) In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
15. Ellen R.F. (1988) Fetishism. Man (N.S.) 23: 213–235.
16. Fabian J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
17. Fox N. (2002) Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives. Washington: Island Press.
18. Frank A.G. (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
19. Friedel R. (2007) A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20. Friedman J. (1974) The place of fetishism and the problem of materialist interpretations. Critique of Anthropology 1: 26–62.
21. Georgescu-Roegen N. (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
22. Godelier M. (1986) The Mental and the Material. New York: Verso.
23. Graeber D. (2001) Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our own Dreams. Houndmills: Palgrave.
24. Graeber D. (2007) Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland: AK Press.
25. Graeber D. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House.
26. Grundmann R. (1991) The ecological challenge to Marxism. New Left Review 187: 103–120.
27. Gudeman S. (1986) Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
28. Harris J. (2005) The ordering of things: Organization in Bruno Latour. Sociological Review 53: 163–177.
29. Headrick D.R. (2010) Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
30. Hornborg A. (1992) Machine fetishism, value, and the image of unlimited good: Towards a thermodynamics of imperialism. Man (n.s.) 27: 1–18.
31. Hornborg A. (1999) Money and the semiotics of ecosystem dissolution. Journal of Material Culture 4(2): 143–162.
32. Hornborg, A. (2000) ‘Accumulation based on symbolic versus intrinsic “productivity”: Conceptualizing unequal exchange from Spondylus shells to fossil fuels’. In: Denemark, R., Friedman, J. and Modelski, G. (eds). World System History: The Science of Long-term Change. London: Routledge, 235–252.
33. Hornborg A. (2001a) The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment. Lanham: AltaMira Press.
34. Hornborg A. (2001b) Symbolic technologies: Machines and the Marxian notion of fetishism. Anthropological Theory 1(4): 473–496.
35. Hornborg A. (2006a) Footprints in the cotton fields: The industrial revolution as time-space appropriation and environmental load displacement. Ecological Economics 59(1): 74–81.
36. Hornborg A. (2006b) Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world. Ethnos 1: 21–32.
37. Hornborg A. (2009) Zero-sum world: Challenges in conceptualizing environmental load displacement and ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50(3–4): 237–62.
38. Hornborg A. (2011) Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-sum World. London: Routledge.
39. Ingold T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
40. Jones S.E. (2006) Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism. London: Routledge.
41. Kearney M. (1984) World View. Novato: Chandler and Sharp.
42. Latour B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
43. Latour B. (1996) Aramis or the Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
44. Latour B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
45. Latour B. (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press.
46. Marcus G.E., Fischer M.M.J. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
47. Marsden B., Smith C. (2005) Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-century Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave.
48. Marx K. (1867) Capital Vol. 1, London: Penguin.
49. Mauss M. (1990 [1925]) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton.
50. Miller D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
51. Miller, D. (ed.) (2005) Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press.
52. Mitchell W.J.T. (2005) What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
53. Murra, JV (1975) ‘El tráfico de mullu en la costa del Pacífico’. In: Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 255–267.
54. Pfaffenberger B. (1992) Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology 21(1): 491–516.
55. Pietz, W. (1985–88) The problem of the fetish, I–III. Res 9: 5–17, 13: 23–45, 16: 105–23.
56. Pietz, W. (1993) ‘Fetishism and materialism: The limits of theory in Marx’. In: Apter, E. and Pietz, W. (eds). Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 119–151.
57. Pietz, W. (1998) ‘Afterword: How to grow oranges in Norway’. In: Spyer, P. (ed.) Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. London: Routledge, 245–251.
58. Pomeranz K. (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
59. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, M. (1977) ‘Coastal fishermen, merchants, and artisans in Pre-Hispanic Peru’. In: Benson, E. (ed.) The Sea in the Pre-Columbian World. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 167–188.
60. Sahlins M.D. (1976) Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
61. Sale K. (1995) Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. New York: Perseus.
62. Salomon F. (1986) Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
63. Shimada, I. (1987) ‘Horizontal and vertical dimensions of prehistoric states in north Peru’. In: Haas, J., Pozorski, S. and Pozorski, T. (eds). The Origins and Development of the Andean State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 130–144.
64. Spyer, P. (ed.) (1998) Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. London: Routledge.
65. Taussig M.T. (1980) The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
66. Uexküll, J. von (1982 [1940]) ‘The theory of meaning’, Semiotica 42: 25–82.
67. Winner L. (1993) Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology. Science as Culture 16: 427–452.